Artwork Setup for Custom Tracksuits
By The Velocity Wear Team
Send vector artwork with the fonts outlined, the colours specified, and the mark drawn at the size it will appear. That single file starts the 10-15 working day production window the day it is approved. Anything lifted from a website, screenshotted, or supplied without a colour reference adds a round of revisions before the clock even begins.
What file does each method need?
Screen printing wants vector with the colours separated, because each colour is a screen. DTF accepts raster artwork but needs it at full print size and high resolution, and what 300 DPI actually means for a chest print is worth reading before you send a file. Embroidery is digitised from your artwork into stitches, so fine detail and thin lines have to be simplified. 3D puff needs bold shapes. Sublimation needs the full panel artwork rather than a logo on its own.
If you are unsure, send what you have and say what you want it to look like. The available methods are listed on the wholesale tracksuits page, and a recommendation costs you nothing.
What goes wrong most often?
- Logos pulled from a website, which are sized for a screen and fall apart at print size.
- Live text in a file, which reflows or substitutes if the font is missing at our end.
- No colour reference, so the shade becomes a guess that gets argued about after production.
- Artwork drawn at a size nobody has agreed, which changes how much detail survives.
- Fine linework sent for embroidery, which cannot be stitched at that weight and has to be redrawn.
Each of those is a day or two of back and forth. Preparing artwork files for custom clothing printing covers the fixes in detail, and most of them take a designer ten minutes.
How does approval work?
You receive a layout showing placement and size, you check it against what you asked for, and you confirm. Production then runs 10-15 working days before transit. Check the spelling, the colour reference, the placement measurements and the size of the mark, because approval is the point after which changes stop being free. The pricing page shows how quantity affects the cost of the run you are approving.
Have the person who owns the brand do the approving, not the person who is coordinating the order. The two are often different, and the second one cannot spot a wrong shade of navy.
Does artwork cost extra?
Preparing your supplied file for production is part of the process. What does cost is the decoration itself, priced on stitch count for embroidery and on colours and size for print, so a simplified mark is cheaper to produce as well as faster to approve.
Who should own the source files?
You should, whoever drew them. Brands, societies and departments all change the people who handle their design work, and the organisations that struggle to reorder are the ones whose only copy of the logo is a PNG in an old email thread.
Ask your designer for the editable vector file as well as the exports, and store it somewhere that survives a handover. It costs nothing at the time and saves a redraw later.
Keep the approved production layout with it. That layout records the placement and the size of the mark, which is the fastest way to get a repeat run looking identical to the first one.
None of this is difficult, and all of it is easier before the order than after it. A clean file, an agreed colour and an owner who can approve on the day are what turn a quoted 10-15 working days into an actual 10-15 working days.
